Director: Len Wiseman, 15, 129min

Stars: Bruce Willis, Justin Long, Timothy Olyphant

On general release

BACKGROUND

• Die Hard 4.0 - Sunday Times review

• Die Hard 4.0

• Holding out for a hero

• Bruce Willis comes out fighting for Iraq’s forgotten GI heroes

• Forget the cape. I’m a real action hero

On the Move: Bruce Willis

The action movie legend says that when he's not playing tough nuts on the big screen he loves to drive American muscle cars

Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

Willis is looking a bit old to be punching through walls these days. Come to that, the incongruity of a man in his fifties surfing on a hovering jet fighter plane rather than, say, practising his golf swings is hard to ignore. The biceps may still be as taut as steel cables but there’s the beginning of an old man’s wattle beneath his chin that quivers with his exertions. And that’s why I enjoyed Willis more in this instalment of the Die Hard series than in all of the others put together.

The genius of the film is that it never pretends that Willis’s detective is anything other than a relic from a former era, a dinosaur in a high-tech world, or as one gloating computer boffin puts it, “a Timex watch in a digital age”. His relationship with his college-age daughter has deteriorated to such an extent that they may as well be talking in different languages.

The collision between old-school John McClane and the cyber-terrorists who threaten to shut down America is tinted with a kind of nostalgia for an age when crime – and crime-fighting – required a cinematic derring-do rather than the furtive, inglorious meddling of the computer criminal, safe behind his firewall of anonymity. It’s a case of brute force (or Bruce force, if you prefer) versus the devious, nefarious brains of an evil cyber genius. No prizes for guessing whom we are cheering for.

The digital age has as its envoys the hackers Matt Farrell (Long) – asthmatic, opinionated, no use whatsoever in a fight but essentially on the side of good – and Thomas Gabriel (Olyphant, deploying his patented thousand-yard stare), the mastermind who wants to hold the world to ransom by sending it back to the Stone Age. He’s a formidable opponent – almost supernatural in his omnipotence. He can send helicopters and fighter planes after McClane and turn every traffic light in Washington red, the better to drop missiles on his head. You begin to suspect that he could unleash a plague of digital locusts if he set his mind to it. And the film is such preposterous fun we probably wouldn’t even blink.

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